Earlier this week I released Flatpak 0.8.0. The version change is meant to signal the start of a new long-term supported branch. The 0.8.x series will be strictly bugfixes, and all new
features will happen in 0.9.x.
The release has a few changes, such as a streamlined command line interface and OCI support, but it also has several additions that make Flatpak more future-proof. For instance, we added versioning to all file formats, and a minimal-flatpak-version-required field for applications.
My goal is to get the 0.8 series into the Debian 9 release, and as many other distributions as possible, so that people who create flatpaks can consider the features it supports as a reliable baseline.
Sandboxing has always been one of the pillars of Flatpak, but even more important to me is cross-distro application distribution, even if not sandboxed. This is important because it gives upstream developers a way to directly interact with their users, without having an intermediate distributor. With 0.8 I think we have reached a level where the support for this is solid. So, if you ever thought about experimenting with Flatpak, now is the time!
I leave you with a small screencast showing the new streamlined way to install an application om the command line (on an otherwise empty system):
For information on how to get flatpak, see flatpak.org. Version 0.8.0 is already in the Ubuntu PPA and in Fedora. Other distributions hopefully will get it soon.
Concurrent download/installation a’la docker would be a nice future feature, and let’s encrypt sdk.gnome.org.
Great!
BTW what’s the orange icon near the ethernet icon?
That’s Gnome recording indicator – try it yourself: Ctrl + Shift + Alt + R
The indicator that a screen recording is currently going on.
So you need to know an address and use sudo?
The first one isn’t user friendly, you need to create repository with those links so that user would just type program name and don’t think of anything else. And make some switch for optional manual address handling.
The second one defeats the purpose of going away from rpm/deb. Wasn’t the whole fuzz about flatpack/snap that you could install things without admin rights as a user?
Sudo? There where no sudo involved. You need polkit auth for system install, but if you add –user you don’t.
Is it to me or Fedora 25 is stuck at version 0.6?
I think it is in updates-testing still.
Can we expect LTS flatpak in RHEL future (7.4 maybe) ?
I hope so.
Will there be a way to download an icon, and double click on it to automatically install the app?
I understand that there is gnome software, but it is not available everywhere.. thanks 🙂